This conference will focus on bringing together various scientists involved in different aspects of a common goal: understand biology from a systems point-of-view. These scientists include: cell biologists and geneticists but also computational biologists and physicists. One of the current limitations in the field of Systems Biology relates to the relative lack of students and post-docs who can both think in terms of systems and formulate powerful biological questions. Our overall goal is to organize a forum of discussions for people trained in different fields, from mathematics and physics to classical biology. The goals of this conference are: . To explore the current status of methodologies, resources and information for the mapping of biological networks . To review the current status of various modeling approaches. . To further develop the concepts required to efficiently combine reverse engineering of biological networks and synthetic biology approaches. . To stimulate collaborations, by providing a forum for discussions among scientists with seemingly different interests at the interface of functional genomic and proteomics on the one hand, and computational biology and physics on the other.